Creative Tension: Mujica, King, and Caliphate

For this MLK day, a time of strikes and marches, and hopefully a time for tension and perspective alike, here's a suggested film, text, and podcast.



A Twelve Year Night, directed by Alvaro Brechner. The little-known history of Uruguay, a country I love, comes to light as presented through the experience of three political prisoners under the Cold War-era military dictatorship. Unlike so many others, these three survive; indeed, one of them, Jose 'Pepe' Mujica, eventually becomes President.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King, Jr. Among our country's essential readings, it echoes Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, as well as Socrates in the Apology:

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Caliphate, by Rukmini Callimachi and Andy Mills. A podcast, so it can go with you anywhere, and so it does, or did for me: rough as it was, I couldn't stop listening. In telling the story of ISIS members and going into their territory and into their motivations, the appeal of the call to adventure is turned around, revealed as a force for terrible nihilism in the service of an ideology promising unsullied truth. Difficult as it is to hear, it reminds us of other places too long bogged down in their own tragic monologues, that in this case, we perhaps don't even know the language yet which would permit us to begin a dialogue.